These Broken Wings
by toujourspret
Summary: Written for darksage29 at cg flashfic - Nina reflects; grief is like a wounded animal, at times violent and full of fear. Set between episodes R2:18 and R2:23.


_Author's Note: This is a Nina-centric introspection piece written for darksage29 over at cg_flashfic. I love writing flashfics, but this one was really challenging; I haven't written much at all about Nina, and usually I just kind of toss her in the mix whenever there's major Student Council play. I'm actually not too fond of her as a character, but it was interesting to explore the idea of being responsible for such a terrible thing as the FLEIJA, as well as playing with the idea of personal responsibility and redemption. This fic takes place between R2: Turn 18 and R2: Turn 23, so spoilers up to that point._

_This fic may be triggery to people with issues regarding depression. Please read with caution!  
_

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**These Broken Wings**

She tells herself it's not her fault.

She watches the news a lot. The devastation was total; the newscaster describes a total pit where the city used to be. He describes a sharp drop that rolls gently into a small, manmade lake where people once lived and worked and played. She sees a house neatly bisected by the blast, opened like a dollhouse at the back to reveal its innards. There is a refrigerator that the cameras keep panning to; alphabet magnets spell out a message of a happy home. The 'v' in 'love' is an angry slash pointing to its missing half.

She tells herself it's not her fault.

She remembers the look of hollow horror on so many faces. There had been a woman screaming on the street corner, her broken, hoarse cries shrill and piercing like air raid sirens, like a million screams unheard as the center of the world evaporated into fine grit sand. This is the sound that wakes her up at night, chest heaving, sweat-damp clothing clinging sticky to her skin. It is the sound she hears at the bottom of every silence. She closes her eyes and the world dissolves into cacophony.

She tells herself it's not her fault.

She thinks about the broken look on his face. Beyond even screaming, beyond anything but the crushing grip of agony, she watches him force himself to keep going when everything he's ever cared about has spit on him. If she closes her eyes, she can still see them smiling together in their school uniforms, until Nunally's memory starts to melt into Euphemia and she can barely keep herself from flying apart. Euphemia smiles at her sweetly, head cocked to the side, and asks her to take care of him, and she can't. She just can't, because she remembers that manic grin, that wide, vapid stare. Polite words, empty words. Evil words.

She knows she wanted to hurt him, then. When she remembers the sight of her princess, arms outstretched in elegance marred only by the bulky black shape of the gun, she knows she wanted to hurt him. And she had, tricked, fooled by Schneizel into creating the FLEIJA. She'd broken him. She'd done it for Euphemia,

She tells herself it's not her fault and knows she'll never believe it.

And when she thinks about the way it is, the way it used to be, the way it should be now, it's like a lump growing in her stomach, cancerous and bitter and acidic until her whole world is nothing but this painful, angry, hurtful thing inside of her. It eats at her, gnawing her bones like daws at Prometheus' side. Each day she wakes up and her liver has grown back, torturously new and fresh and sweet. When she imagine-remembers the way sunlight gleamed on Euphemia's hair, she feels sick, and when she remember-imagines the way she'd smiled so peacefully, so mindlessly, with hope and love and death falling from her outstretched palms lifted in supplication, even that dark creature inside her goes cold and silent. She's jealous of the dead, then, surrounded by that frigid, empty wasteland that used to be her heart.

But there's no such thing as a truly empty space, and tears, like raindrops, begin to seep in. They're hers, for Euphemia, for that glorious young girl who hated no one and loved so openly that it shamed the people around her. They're his, for the guilt she sees on his face when he approaches her, for the sister he vowed to protect but can't seem to stop harming. They're the survivors', for homes and lives and memories lost, the faces that pan by in each thirty second long memorial clip, as if a half of a minute could do any sort of justice, could even pretend to express the wonder of even one life, much less tens of millions of lives at once. They seep in slowly, filling her to bursting until she has to let them out in great, sobbing gasps.

It's all her fault.

Day by day, these tears run a river through her, trailing in their eddied swirls the fragments of a million billion moments, innumerable snippets of life and death and love and tragedy. They leave behind a kind of silt, a sediment that's slowly filling in that hollow place inside of her. Slowly, it drifts in and covers everything with a thin layer of time. Blissful time, like the opposite of dust, that shines up the memories and makes them somehow better than they were before. Time that coats and pads the sharp edges of mourning until one day she can run her finger along the razor glass edge of Euphemia's crystalline laugh and barely bleed at all.

She'll never love again, she swears it. With the infinite wisdom of an eighteen year old, she carefully folds her heart away with the fragile shards of dear memory, tucking them down with hope and remorse into the box of wisdom. She pricks herself once, on the sugar-bright sweep of Euphemia's curls. The pain that comes is so beautiful, thrilling and exuberant. It rustles in her heart, disturbing the silt a little to reveal the shining gleam of a memory. A smile. The graceful arc of one hand in the air. That particular note of her laugh, vulnerable as if it were almost a sob. She clutches it close and expects it to cut, waits for the blood and the pain and the anger and tears, but it's warm. Warmer than she's expected, dissolving into her skin to sit thumping in the hollow of her throat like a first kiss. She tests herself on another shard, over and over again until she's dizzy in the memory of the girl she's loved. That's when she knows she's ready. That's how she knows that everything's going to be okay.

It's all her fault. She understands it now.

And when he gives her a chance to redeem herself, she takes it.


End file.
